


bits & pieces

by loveleee



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-04-04 07:36:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 18,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14015427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveleee/pseuds/loveleee
Summary: Just a place to keep my Riverdale prompt fics together. Mostly Betty/Jughead. A mix of canon, canon divergence, and maybe some straight up AUs...





	1. the way you flirt is shameful.

Jughead doesn’t realize he’s been staring until Betty nudges him in the arm. “Huh?”

“Do you want the rest of my fries?” she says, barely suppressing a laugh. “You’re looking at them like an oasis in the desert.”

“Oh.” He can feel the tips of his ears turning red; thankfully, enough time has passed between haircuts that the ends of his hair more or less hide them. “I’m just…thinking about how cold they must be. Just shivering there on your plate. You’re so neglectful, Betts.”

With a smile, Betty nudges her lunch tray towards him. Despite their recent lack of progress on The Case of the Missing Polly Cooper, she’s appeared to be in a good mood all day, giggling at even the stupidest of his jokes. She raises her eyebrows at him playfully before pushing back her chair. “Here. I have to run to the library before sixth period, anyway.”

“Yeah, I gotta talk to Reg before practice today,” Archie adds, grabbing his backpack from the empty seat beside him.

Jughead waves them both off with one hand, the other scraping up what remains of his ketchup from his tray with one of Betty’s (truly frigid) fries.

It takes him longer than it should to register that Veronica is still at the table. Staring at  _him_.

He meets her eyes, and she shakes her head slowly. “The way you flirt is shameful.”

Jughead nearly chokes on his orange juice. “ _What?_ ”

“And I do mean shameful as in bad. Like, really bad. ‘ _You’re neglecting your french fries’?_ ”

He swallows, crossing his arms over his chest as he leans back in his seat. “I’m not – that wasn’t flirting.”

“You’re right, it wasn’t,” Veronica agrees. “It was a pathetic  _attempt_  at flirting.”

Jughead narrows his eyes. Veronica Lodge had been a student at Riverdale High for all of three weeks, and already she seemed to know the entire sophomore class as though she’d grown up alongside them for years, deep, dark secrets and all.

Even his.  _How_  did she know  _his_?

“Betty and I are just friends,” he mutters.

“Again, stating the obvious,” Veronica retorts. “But it’s clear that’s not what you  _want_  to be.”

He opens his mouth to speak, but shuts it almost as quickly. If he’s learned anything about Veronica in the short time he’s known her, it’s that there’s not really a point in denying it.

Veronica sighs, resting her chin in her palm, one elbow on the table. “You are so lucky, Jughead Jones.”

Jughead snorts. “Uh, why?”

She tilts her head, her lips curling up. Her smile is every bit as intriguing –  _and_ terrifying – as the words that follow:

“Because I’m going to help you.”


	2. what's in that bag and why are you hiding it here?

The door behind him opens and shuts; he knows without turning to look that it’s Betty.

“I wasn’t sure if you were coming,” Jughead says, clacking away at the keyboard of the old desktop computer they use to produce the Blue & Gold. The next issue is due to the printer in two days, so as is their custom, they’ve been spending their afternoons together in the cramped office, making edits and finalizing the layout so it’s ready for print. Normally Jughead enters the room mere minutes after the final bell to find Betty already engrossed in revisions; today, he’d arrived to find it empty, and nearly half an hour had passed before his girlfriend showed up.

This week’s issue in particular has been a challenge to keep on track. Lately they’ve been getting…distracted.

“Just had to run an errand.” He hears her shuffling around the big desk by the blackboard, and turns his head just in time to see her drop a plastic bag into one of the drawers.

“What’s in the bag?”

Truth be told, he’s only mildly interested in the answer – until Betty hesitates, that is, her cheeks flooding with color in a way that makes his heart twist.

“Supplies,” she says finally, coming to sit on the edge of his desk. She nudges his shin with her foot, and he smiles, bumping her back with his knee.

“What, like pens? We can ask the school for those,” he reminds her.

Betty shakes her head, her ponytail bobbing so sweetly he gets the urge to tug on it like he’s six years old again. “No…”

It’s the teasing lilt to her voice that clues him in. “ _Oh_. You mean like…”

“Yeah.” A slow smile spreads across her face as she slips into his lap, winding her arms around his neck. A little over a week has passed since they’d become “official” again; since she’d straddled him on his sofa, and kissed him, and let him unzip her pink dress.

His hands come to rest on her hips, and he slips his fingers up under the hem of her shirt, tracing lightly over the small of her back. “And why are you hiding it here?”

Her smile shifts in a way that sends heat rushing through him, and then so does her body, pressing in closer to his. Jughead swallows.

“Well, you know my mom searches my room for ‘contraband’, like, once a week. But also…we haven’t really had a chance to be alone lately,” she says, her voice dropping. “My mom and brother are always around, and your dad’s living with you again…”

“So you wanna do it  _here_?”

The Blue & Gold office was barely sufficient for its actual, intended purpose of hosting the school newspaper. Jughead wasn’t exactly an expert on sex – yet – but he was at least  _pretty_  sure that it was more pleasant when experienced in surroundings that weren’t so…dusty. And wooden. And subject to random visits from the school janitor.

Betty bites her lower lip. “Maybe?”

It’s shameful, he thinks, how little convincing he needs. “Right now?”

“Of course not,” Betty scoffs. “We’ve got to fix the kerning on this headline first. It’s barely readable.”

Jughead’s never been so motivated to finish up a page layout in his life.


	3. does he know about the babies?

“Your dad was wrong,” Betty tells him, their hands clasped together as they meander along the sidewalk, taking the long way home. “The circle doesn’t end with just us.”

(Alice had barely protested when Betty had told her that Jughead was going to walk her home from Pop’s;  _oh, let them be, Alice,_  FP had said, his voice gruff and familiar with her mother in a way that made Betty’s stomach hurt.)

Jughead nods. “Chic. I was thinking that, too.” He’s quiet for a moment. “Do you think he’ll tell anyone?”

Betty shakes her head slowly. “I don’t know who he’d tell. Other than the cops, which wouldn’t make any sense. He doesn’t seem to have any friends.” She shivers. “He’s just in the house all day, hanging out with my mom. It’s so  _weird_ , Jug. I don’t think I even realized how weird it was until all this happened. I mean, after what Polly did, my mom was just so excited he was  _there_.”

Betty, on the other hand, had been so wrapped up in her own misery that the strangeness of the situation – her brother moving in, her father moving out – had hardly registered in the moment. By inviting Chic into their home, she’d finally managed to do the one thing that years of straight A’s and neatly made beds and pristine white sneakers had never accomplished: make Alice Cooper happy. And at first, Chic’s quirks – to use a polite term – had been almost comforting in their familiarity, in the way they had seemed to line up so neatly with her own.

One dead body and a sunken car later, they’re looking a lot more like red flags.

“It’s like he’s just this…replacement,” Betty continues. It feels good, incredibly good, to finally be able to say these things out loud; to have Jughead beside her again, listening, holding her hand. “I mean, he’s been sleeping in Polly’s room for weeks. She doesn’t even know.”

“You didn’t tell her?”

“I tried,” Betty insists. “I’ve called the farm, like, five times. But she never comes to the phone. Chic doesn’t seem to care, anyway.”

“Does he know about the babies?”

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I mean…I think so? But we literally  _never_  talk about Polly. My mom acts like she doesn’t even exist.” Betty stops suddenly, and buries her face against the side of his arm, the soft denim of his jacket cool against her skin. “Oh my god, Jug. I’m an  _aunt_. And I’ve never even  _seen_  my niece and nephew. I don’t even know what color  _hair_  they have.”

Jughead shifts so they’re face to face, and wraps his arms around her. She slumps against him, grateful there is someone else here to keep her upright for once, someone other than her own two feet. “Well, if it’s anything but red, you can bet Cheryl will be sneaking into their bedrooms at night and dying it for them.”

She frowns into his chest. “It’s not funny.”

“It’s a  _little_ funny.”

Jughead presses his fingers into the small of her back, bringing her closer, and rests his chin on the top of her head. “It’s going to be okay,” he says, quieter, and presses his nose into her hair. It feels almost like a kiss. “And I’m going to be here. I promise.”

She’s not so sure about the first part. But she believes the second part. She can feel that he does, too.

And for now, at least, it feels like enough.


	4. i think this room is bugged. (cheryl/veronica)

By the time Veronica Lodge moved to Riverdale, she knew that she was at least  _somewhat_  interested in girls. She’d held hands with her friends in the hallways at Spence, and tried to ignore the little electric shock that ran along her skin when it was a  _particular_  hand clasped in her own; she’d kissed them at parties and clubs, and not just so Nick St. Clair and his band of horny idiots could watch through a haze of strobe lights and weed smoke.

She hadn’t known  _how_  interested until she’d kissed Betty Cooper during their audition for the cheerleading squad, and then dreamed about her blonde hair and pink mouth every single night for a week.

At the end of the day, though, she and Betty were fated to be a little more Leslie and Anne, a little less Ellen and Portia. Besides: Veronica wanted someone who would keep her on her toes. Betty was many things;  _impulsive_  and  _exciting_  were not among them.

Maybe that’s why Veronica feels shockingly fine about the fact that right now, Cheryl has her on her  _literal_ toes, leading her through the creaky, cavernous hallways of Thornhill Manor so they can find a place to continue the make out session they had started in the empty girls’ locker room after River Vixens practice, and extended into the backseat of the Lodges’ town car on the drive across town.

(“We can’t wake Nana Rose from her afternoon nap,” Cheryl had told her, and pointed to a spot beside the door where Veronica could leave her heels.

“That’s very considerate of you,” Veronica had said, carefully unclasping the straps at her ankles.

Cheryl had rolled her eyes. “If we wake her up, we have to  _talk_ to her.”)

So far Cheryl has turned up her nose at three different rooms, proclaiming them  _too drafty, too cramped,_ and  _too nostalgic,_ which Veronica takes to mean Cheryl actually has a pleasant childhood memory or two associated with it. It’s still unclear to Veronica whether anyone other than Cheryl’s grandmother is actually at home, but she keeps her voice down just in case. “Remind me why we can’t just go to your bedroom?”

Cheryl looks back at her for only a moment, her eyes sweeping over Veronica in a way that makes her whole body feel hot. “You’re not ready,” she says, and continues down the corridor.

Veronica isn’t even sure what that  _means_ , but she feels even more desperate to just pick a room and get on with it. (Or get  _off_  – oh, whatever.)

“What about this one?” she suggests, pushing open the door to what appears to be the second library they’ve come across in the last five minutes. It’s smaller than the first, but there’s a very comfortable-looking leather couch beneath the window, and a Tiffany lamp on the table beside it that could work perfectly for mood lighting.

Cheryl stands in the doorway and taps her finger against her chin. “Hmm. I think this room is bugged.”

Veronica almost laughs, until she remembers that Cheryl Blossom doesn’t make jokes. And even besides that: it’s a  _thing_  that happens to rich people sometimes, rich people who do bad things that must be proven, with evidence, in a court of law.

People like, say, Veronica’s father.

Her pulse races. “Someone is bugging your house?”

To her credit, Cheryl seems to understand why this would upset Veronica in particular. She reaches out one pale, manicured hand, toying with the collar of Veronica’s shirt between her red-tipped fingernails. “Oh – don’t worry. Just me.”

“Wait – what?”

“I bugged it. You never know when you might need blackmail material. You of all people should know that, Ronniekins.” Cheryl shrugs. “Come on, let’s find another room. We wouldn’t want you to feel…inhibited.”

Well.

Veronica feels her own mouth drop open involuntarily, at an uncharacteristic loss for words. It’s not the answer she had expected, though now that she’s heard it, she’s not sure why she would have expected anything else.

A million questions run through her mind – chief among them,  _How many rooms do you have to bug in your own house before you lose track of them?_  – but she shoves them aside in favor of a decision.

She steps towards Cheryl, closer, close enough that the other girl steps back, her heels bumping against the wall. Veronica moves closer still. “Cheryl.”

“Veronica.”

“I’m getting impatient.”

Cheryl doesn’t answer, and Veronica has to hold back her smile. Sometimes she likes to submit, to simper, to follow.

But she also likes to turn the tables.

She bites her lower lip, leaning in. “And if you think being recorded makes me  _more_  inhibited,” she murmurs, “you don’t know me very well.”

Cheryl swallows.  And seems to come to her own decision.

“This one’ll do.”


	5. did you enjoy yourself last night?

Jughead holds his breath, and knocks on the door.

Thankfully, it’s Betty who answers about thirty seconds later, as he’d hoped. She’s still in her pajamas – sky blue with white clouds, a matching top and bottom – and looks adorably rumpled, her hair in a messy knot on the top of her head, remnants of mascara streaked beneath her eyes.

(He doesn’t think the words  _I love you_  so much as feel them, deep and sudden and true in his chest.)

Her face softens the moment she sees him. “Juggie.”

“I thought I’d walk you to school,” he says, and – after looking past her to make sure they’re not being watched – leans down to peck her on the lips.

“Come in,” she says, and steps aside to let him out of the rain.

Betty’s mother is seated at the kitchen table, along with a blond man whose face looks unsettlingly familiar: same green eyes, same cheekbones, same pouty lips as Betty.

Of all the times to finally meet her long-lost older brother.

“I’m gonna go get dressed. Have some pancakes.” Betty nudges him gently towards the kitchen, and then disappears up the stairs.

Jughead pulls the strap of his messenger bag over his head and hangs it on the unoccupied chair at the end of the table. “Hey, Mrs. Cooper. Hey, um – I’m Jughead. You must be Chic.”

Chic looks him over for only a moment before turning back to his plate. “Hey.”

“Well, you heard Betty. Help yourself,” Alice says, gesturing to the spread of pancakes and sliced fruit on the table. It’s far too much food for three people, at least two of whom typically eat half a grapefruit for breakfast (though in Betty’s case, he knows, not by choice).

“Thanks.” He loads up a plate with a short stack and drizzles a modest amount of Blossom Family Farms maple syrup on top before settling into his chair to eat.

“So, Jug Head,” Alice says, pronouncing his name as usual with an oddly stilted pause between syllables, “did you enjoy yourself last night?”

The question comes at the exact moment Jughead is about to swallow a mouthful of pancakes. He nearly chokes.

She couldn’t possibly  _know_ …or could she? No. Betty would never have told her.

But. What if she’d been waiting up when Betty came home last night? What if Alice had forced the truth out of her? What if she could just  _tell?_

Betty wouldn’t do that, he reminds himself. She wouldn’t tell her mother what they’d done, and then invite him inside and leave him alone to eat breakfast with Alice the very next day. Not unless losing their virginity together had flipped an evil-switch in Betty’s brain and turned her into a total sociopath, Buffy-and-Angel-style.

Jughead coughs for an embarrassingly lengthy amount of time, pounding at his chest lightly with one fist, and then soothes his throat with a swig of orange juice. “Sorry?”

“Veronica’s confirmation. Betty said you were all dancing to some DJ from Manhattan until midnight. When  _I_ was growing up, a confirmation party ended with a nice buffet lunch and a toast from your grandparents.” She says this last part to Chic, as if expecting him to confirm that he, too, enjoyed a nice buffet lunch after his own confirmation. (It’s somewhat of an insensitive thing to say, Jughead thinks, to someone you left to be raised by a cabal of abusive nuns.)

Chic just shrugs.

“It was fun,” Jughead says, shoveling more pancakes into his mouth.

Thankfully, Alice seems uninterested in hearing more details about the party (which Jughead is poorly equipped to provide anyway, having left early after spending the first hour trapped in a spiral of self-loathing). She chatters on to a mostly-silent Chic about her plans for the day, while Jughead eats, keeping a steady stream of food and drink flowing to his mouth just in case Alice changes her mind and expects him to use it to speak.

Betty finally reappears just as the waistband of Jughead’s pants is beginning to feel uncomfortably snug. “Ready?”

Jughead’s on his feet, strapping his messenger bag back over his chest before she can even get the whole word out. “Ready. Thanks, Mrs. Cooper. Nice to meet you, Chic.”

“Everything okay?” Betty asks him as they step out onto the sidewalk, hands clasped as they huddle together beneath an umbrella.

“Yeah. Your mom just wanted to know what I thought about the DJ we apparently danced to all night long.”

Betty gasps. “Oh, my god. I forgot. I’m so sorry. I should have told you –”

“It’s fine.” Jughead squeezes her hand. “We just…might need to get better at getting our stories straight. If we’re gonna, y’know, be…doing this more. I mean, if you, um, want to.”

“Jug.” Betty stops in the middle of the sidewalk, tugging at his arm so he’ll face her. “Of  _course_  I want to. Did you think…?”

“No! No. I just didn’t want to assume –”

She kisses him then, quickly, but when she breaks the kiss she doesn’t move away, her lips just a hair’s breadth away from his. “I want to. I want to get  _really good_  at getting our stories straight.”

He laughs, and kisses her again, and when he wraps his arm around her shoulder and she leans into him as they stumble down the sidewalk again, he knows it’s true. “Mm, okay. Noted.”


	6. always the tone of surprise.

_The Agora began its history as the heart of the Athenian political and economic…_

_From the 6 th until the 1st century BC, it functioned as the center of the government and the judiciary…_

Betty sighs, letting her head drop onto the pages of her world history textbook. Looming exam or not, she can’t possibly concentrate on the Ancient Greeks right now – not while Polly is living in Thornhill Manor, at the mercy of the Blossoms; not while her parents’ bitter squabbling has elevated from occasional outburst to daily ritual; not while there is still a murderer running loose in Riverdale, the town she once thought of as safe, and still thinks of as home.

Not while her boyfriend – boyfriend! – is splayed out on her bed beside her, a lock of dark hair falling into his eyes as he frowns down at a series of pre-calc exercises.

They’ve kissed six times, including the first time; most of them brief, all of them responsible for a fluttery, pleasant swooping feeling in her stomach that she can more or less summon at will now, simply by replaying them again in her head. She knows that eventually she’ll have to stop keeping count of kisses, but for now there’s still a silly little thrill to it, like she’s adding them to a collection, a growing body of evidence that Jughead Jones actually  _likes_  her.

That she likes  _him_ , too, more than she ever could have predicted.

When she’d invited him over to do their homework together today, she’d led him up to her bedroom without a second thought. It was where she’d always done her homework, sometimes with Jughead beside her on the bed, as he is now, or sitting cross-legged on the floor, or even – rarely – at her desk.

But it had occurred to her rather quickly that those other times were different. Usually Archie was there, too. Usually Polly or her parents were home.

Those other times, her bed was merely a soft, comfortable place to sit, large enough to accommodate multiple people and their various notebooks and textbooks. Not the potential setting for a thousand  _other_  things two people who were dating might want to do together.

Heart thumping a little harder than usual, Betty knocks her foot against Jughead’s. He turns to look at her, eyes crinkling up at the corners as he takes her in, his position mirroring her own: belly-down on the comforter, legs bent at the knees, feet in the air. “Giving up on the Greeks?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” She bumps her foot against his again and leaves it there this time, their ankles resting together. “Juggie, is this…okay?”

Jughead taps the eraser end of his pencil against his chin. “Is what okay?”

“This, like…doing homework.”

He seems confused. “Why wouldn’t it be okay?”

Betty rolls onto her back, resting her hands on her stomach, her fingers tapping together nervously. This might be easier to say if she’s not looking at his face while she says it. “It’s just – it’s what we’d normally do. As friends. And now we’re  _not_  friends, and my parents aren’t home, and…we could do something else.”

After a beat of silence, she forces herself to look at him, and is relieved to find that Jughead doesn’t look upset, merely thoughtful. He places his pencil between the pages of his textbook and shuts it, shifting onto his side to face her.

“First of all, we’re not  _not_  friends. We’ll always be friends. It’s just…not…all we are. Second…” He swallows. “Is that what you want to do?”

“Do you?”

“I asked first,” he says. “But sure. Yeah.”

Betty frowns. “So why didn’t you say anything?”

“I don’t know, I’m kind of following your lead here,” he admits. “I don’t have a lot of prior experience to fall back on.”

“Me neither.”

He studies her for a moment, and then wriggles towards her, closing the small gap between them on the bed. His hand falls to her hip and he pulls her onto her side so their faces are close. He kisses her, soft at first but then firmer, his tongue touching her lip.

 _Seven_ , Betty thinks, and can’t stop the smile that spreads across her face.

She can feel Jughead smile, too, and she realizes that she likes it –  _feeling_  his smile against her mouth – although it makes it more difficult to kiss.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she murmurs. “I like kissing you.”

He makes a pleased sound in his throat. “Always the tone of surprise.”

She laughs, pulling back slightly. “That’s from Harry Potter.”

The look on his face is somehow smug and embarrassed all at once, and she notes with delight that he’s developed a flush high on his cheeks.

“I remember when you finally read the last book, and that was  _all_  you wanted to talk about,” he says, his fingers flexing on her hip. “Not Harry dying and coming back to life, or defeating Voldemort, or the whole Snape thing…just Ron and Hermione, finally hooking up.”

“I was like, twelve,” she says, swatting lightly at his chest. Her mother had refused to let her read the books or watch the movies until she was “mature enough to handle the material”, but Jughead, lacking any such parental supervision, had devoured the entire series at the library by age eight. She still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to avoid letting any major spoilers slip in the interim.

“A hopeless romantic, even then,” he says.

True, she thinks, though back then she’d still thought that Archie’s red hair made him her real-life Ron Weasley. It had taken Betty a few years to look past the surface, to realize that while Archie was off slaying his demons – playing sports, learning guitar, kissing girls – someone else was always there for her to lean on when she needed it.

“I am much older and much wiser now,” she says, curling her fingers in the soft fabric of his t-shirt. “But you have to admit they were super cute.”

“If I do, can we stop talking about children’s books?”

“You brought it up,” she giggles, and then gasps as he pushes her gently onto her back, moving over her, and for the next little while there’s no reason to talk about children’s books, or any books, or anything at all except the fact that Betty completely loses track of her kiss count by the time her parents get home for dinner that night.


	7. i'm ready to try again if you are.

“So tell me more about this kiss with Veronica.”

Betty trails her fingernail down over his ribs, smiling into his shoulder when he shivers under her touch. Another addition to the list of things she’s learned about his body over the last few weeks: he’s ticklish _._  “Is that what you were thinking about this whole time?”

“ _No_.” Jughead shifts, moving onto his side to face her. “Doesn’t mean I’m not curious, though.”

Stretching her legs out like a cat, Betty yawns, and tugs the bathrobe they’re using as a makeshift blanket a little closer up to her chin. Though their hostess had only semi-ironically described the cabin as “rustic,” it’s possibly the most comfortable bed Betty’s ever laid on (and definitely the most comfortable one she’s ever  _gotten_  laid on). She’s sleepy and happy and warm, and not really in the mood to talk about Veronica.

“There’s not much to tell.”

Jughead raises his eyebrows, clearly skeptical.

“It was at River Vixens tryouts last year,” she offers. “It lasted for about three seconds, and it was just to, like…impress Cheryl.”

“ _Why_  would that impress Cheryl?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Veronica that.”

His mouth slants up in a smile. “I’m not talking to Veronica about kissing ever again in my life.” He pauses, his foot rubbing against her calf beneath the bathrobe. “Did it work?”

Betty smirks. “We made the squad, didn’t we?”

Jughead laughs, and then buries his face in his pillow without warning, mumbling a string of words she can’t make out. “What?”

He moves his head just enough so his mouth is unencumbered. “I said, I feel too good right now. I don’t think this is real.”

His words cause a twinge in her chest; he’s been saying them, in one way or another, ever since they started sleeping together. Nonchalant, offhandedly. Like he still can’t believe, despite everything they’ve been through together, that she would want him this way.

(She does.  _Badly_.)

She pinches at his hip with her fingers, and giggles when he yelps, jerking away. “Did that feel real?”

“Mmm.” He narrows his eyes. “Betty Cooper, Mistress of Pain. Where did that come from?”

Betty bites her bottom lip, her eyes drawn to the black wig lying in a heap on the floor where Jughead had tossed it after his eager hands knocked it askew. There hadn’t  _really_  been any pain involved – just the overwhelming, satisfying, terrifying,  _electrifying_  fact that  _she_ was in control.  

“Did you like it?”

“Was I not clear about that?” When she doesn’t answer, he adds, “Yeah, Betts, I liked it. A lot.” Jughead clears his throat. “I was thinking. We could try it the other way, too, sometime. If you want.”

Betty taps her chin lightly, pretending to consider it. “You want to wear my wig?”

He laughs. “You know what I mean.”

And she does. She’s imagined it: his hands pinning her wrists over her head; his weight pressing her down into the mattress; his voice low in her ear, telling her what to do. The thought sends a curl of heat through her belly, and she presses her legs together, suddenly desperate to be touched again.

“Yeah,” she says, flattening her palm against his chest, feeling his heartbeat pulsing under his skin. “You’d be into that?”

His fingers trail down the valley between her breasts, splaying over her ribcage, and she arches into the heat of his hand. “Maybe. I think so.”

“Right now?”

“I think I might need some more lessons from you first.” Jughead rolls onto his back and grabs her by the hips, pulling her on top of him. “But I’m ready to try again if you are.”


	8. you were meant to be watching him!

“Knock knock.”

Betty leaps back from the desk with a gasp, her shoulders slumping in relief when she sees who’s in the doorway. “Oh my god, Jug,” she breathes, pressing a hand to her chest. “You scared me.”

“Sorry.” He steps into the room, taking in the oddity that is Polly Cooper’s bedroom as occupied by the older brother she has never met. Somehow, it simultaneously looks untouched  _and_ as though a squatter has been living there for weeks: a plaid men’s bathrobe hanging off the end of the white four-poster bed; a pair of worn jeans crumpled on the floor beside the empty hamper; a laptop, webcam, and half-eaten bag of neon orange Gloritos on the otherwise spotlessly clean desk. A photo of Polly and Jason is still stuck in the corner of the floor-length mirror beside the window.

“You were right. This is…really weird.”

“What are you doing up here?” Betty hisses. “You were meant to be watching him!”

“It’s fine. He’s asleep.” Jughead steps closer and rubs her shoulder, an attempt at placation, but she shrugs it off in irritation. “He knocked himself out with a glass of warm milk.” His nose wrinkles at the memory.

“He might be faking it,” Betty points out.

The same thought had occurred to Jughead. Chic had not seemed particularly eager to bond with his sister’s boyfriend, despite their shared history of employment at local movie theaters, and shared love for one Betty Cooper (though the latter was still unconfirmed and highly suspicious on Chic’s part, as far as Jughead was concerned). Every question he’d lobbed Chic’s way about the Bijou was met with deflection, monosyllables, or a stare.  _Pretending_  to fall asleep would have been doing both of them a favor.

But it could also quite possibly be a ploy, meant to lull Jughead into a false sense of security so that he would do precisely what he is doing now, and allow Chic to catch the two of them in the act of investigating his bedroom.

So Jughead had waited patiently, counting to 300 in his head, and then crept as quietly as he could to Chic’s side, where he proceeded to thrust his fist at the young man’s face three times in a row, stopping just short of an actual punch. It was a game he and Archie had played growing up, guaranteed to make a fake-sleeper flinch, right up until the day in eighth grade when Archie had misjudged his aim and socked Jughead square in the nose.

Despite his general apathy towards athletics, Jughead had always had better control over his limbs than that. And Chic hadn’t flinched.

“Nah, he’s out. I checked,” Jughead assures her. “Find anything good?”

Betty sighs. “Depends on what you mean by good. If you mean  _incriminating_ …” She gestures towards the bedside table. “He’s got handcuffs in there.”

Jughead frowns. “Why is that incriminating?”

“I don’t know, I mean, why would he have…” She trails off, a grimace forming as she takes in the smirk slowly spreading across Jughead’s face. “Oh.  _Oh._  Ew. Ewwww.”

“What?” Jughead laughs, slipping his arm around her waist to rap his fingers lightly against the small of her back. “The girl who practically pinned me to the mattress last week doesn’t know what handcuffs are for?”

“I know what they’re for, I just…” Betty shudders, folding her arms over her chest. “He’s my brother. And I didn’t think he was doing that  _here_.”

“He’s doing  _that_  here.” Jughead nods at the webcam on the desk.

“It’s not the same.”

“Uh, okay.”

“They might not even be for that,” Betty insists. “Maybe it’s a magic trick. Maybe he likes magic!”

Jughead laughs again, his other arm finding its way around her middle to pull her in for a hug. “Think about what you just said,” he says, running a hand up her back. “You think  _that_  guy is spending his time up here practicing magic tricks?”

“Maybe!”

Jughead pauses, then whispers, “Maybe they’re Polly’s.”

Betty wrenches away from his grip. “Oh my god, I  _hate_  you.”

“No you don’t,” he says, smug, as she drags him out of the room by the hand. “Are you sure you don’t want to keep looking? Maybe he’s got a whip in there we could borrow.”

“Ohmygod,” Betty groans, pulling him into her own bedroom across the hall. She closes the door behind them. “You wish.”

Jughead scratches at the back of his neck. “Well…so what if I do?”

Betty’s eyes widen for a moment, then soften as she smiles, tugging him towards her by his belt loops. “Then we buy own our, silly.”


	9. midnight, on the bridge. come alone.

“This is it, guys.” Archie lays his palms flat on the table as he exhales a shaky breath. “I’m really gonna do it. Tonight.”

Betty clasps his hand in her own for a moment and squeezes, offering him a warm smile. “It’s going to go great.”

“Yeah man. Don’t sweat it,” Jughead says from his seat in the booth beside her. He takes a huge bite out of his double-decker burger, the one he always favored in high school, and – very much unlike what he always did in high school – chews and swallows before he continues speaking. “Veronica’s crazy about you.”

“I know. I mean, I hope so.” His grin is so nervous, so bright and sweet and guileless, that Betty’s heart flops in her chest.

“Talk us through it,” she says. “Maybe it’ll ease your nerves.”

“Okay.” Archie nods. “So we’re having dinner with her parents. And afterwards, we’re supposed to go to a movie, but my dad’s going to call me and say there’s some kind of construction emergency he needs me for.”

Betty nods along, trying her best to keep her expression neutral. No one had ever accused Archie Andrews – nor his father – of being a great liar. Presumably, given her family history, it was one of the things Veronica loved about him.

“So I’ll leave, but then when Ronnie goes into her bedroom after I’ve gone, she’s gonna find this note with a single red rose.” Archie slides a thick piece of parchment across the table, folded in the middle, and Betty leans in to read it as Jughead flips it open with one hand.

_Midnight, on the bridge. Come alone._

Betty exchanges a look with Jughead, and knows instantly that he’s having the same reaction she is. Jughead purses his lips, and taps on the paper a few times with his index finger.

“Sorry, Arch. I think I may have misunderstood something here. Do you want to marry Veronica, or murder her?”

.

Several rewrites later, Archie’s note to Veronica is finally more  _seductive_  than it is  _serial killer_. As the sun starts to dip below the horizon, he waves goodbye from the driver’s seat of his dad’s truck, and pulls out of the parking lot, headed for the Pembrooke.

Jughead gives Archie a thumbs up before he turns to Betty. “You driving home?”

She shakes her head. “I thought I’d walk.”

“Want some company?”

“Sure.” She backs up slowly towards the sidewalk. “It’s pretty out of your way, though.”

Jughead shrugs. “It’s either that or listen to my dad yell at the tv while he gets literally every Jeopardy question wrong.”

Betty giggles, tucking her hair behind her ears as he falls into pace beside her. She’s seen more of Jughead in the last three months than she had in the three years prior, ever since he moved to Philadelphia for grad school, which also happened to be where she was still living since graduating from Penn in the spring. They’ve been meeting up for coffee and lunches a few times a week, and even spent a recent Sunday afternoon meandering around the art museum together. When she’d decided to drive back up to Riverdale for a brief Thanksgiving break, inviting him along for the ride had been a no-brainer.

It’s been nice, she thinks, to rekindle the friendship they’d more or less let fade away after high school ended.

“So,” Jughead says, after they’ve walked a few blocks in comfortable near-silence. “Archie and Veronica are going to be  _engaged_  in a couple hours.”

“Yeah, if she doesn’t show up with a handgun in her purse.”

Jughead snorts. “Meet me on the bridge at midnight. Alone. Bring $50,000 in unmarked bills.”

“Archie’s just so… _Archie_  sometimes,” Betty sighs. “I’m happy for them, though.”

“Yeah, me too.” She sees Jughead glance at her from the corner of her eye. “I kind of wondered how you felt about it all.”

“What, like…if I’d be upset or something?” She shakes her head firmly. “I haven’t felt that way about Archie in years. God. If I were still pining after him, that’d be…”

“Pathetic?” he supplies helpfully. Betty rolls her eyes and elbows him in the arm.

“No. Well, maybe. It’s just, it’s been like, five years since high school. It’s a long time to like someone and never do anything about it.” And anyway, she had done something about it: she’d told him how she felt, and he’d rejected her. At the time it had been painful –  _so_  painful – but after a few weeks of wallowing, she’d picked herself up and moved on. Kissed other boys. Dated Trev Brown for most of her junior year. Attended prom stag, with Ethel and Jughead as her “dates.”

All the while, two of her best friends had fallen in love. And she’d realized pretty quickly how much better they were together than the boy-and-girl-next-door fantasy she’d cooked up and clung to throughout so much of her teenage years.

Jughead’s quiet for a moment. “Yeah.”

Betty sneaks a glance at the man beside her; he’s a little broader in the shoulders than he was in high school, with a little more stubble on his chin, but otherwise he looks almost exactly the same, down to the plaid sherpa jacket he’s wearing and the crown beanie still perched on his head. The little frown on his face is familiar too, reminiscent of the look he’d get when they were working against a deadline on the Blue and Gold together. A sudden rush of affection pulses through her, growing warm in her chest.

“I’m really glad you moved to Philly, Jug,” she admits, feeling almost shy as she says it.

He lifts his head to meet her eyes, his frown softening into something she can’t quite place. “Me too. It’s a cool place.” He pauses. “Company’s not bad, either.”

By the time they turn onto Betty’s street, her parents’ house in sight at the end of the block, she finds herself wishing the walk was just a little bit longer. Jughead seems to be having the same thought, his long strides slowing down as they approach.

She stops in front of the steps that lead from the front lawn down to the sidewalk, turning to face him. “This is me,” she says lightly.

But Jughead doesn’t respond; he just looks at her, that slight frown on his face again as though he’s thinking something through, coming to a decision. Betty quirks an eyebrow. “What?”

“I, um.” He falters on whatever it is he’s going to say, swallowing hard, his eyes darting down to the ground before returning to meet her gaze.

She touches his wrist with her fingertips. “What?”

His answer is not what she expects: his hands coming to cup her face, his thumb brushing her cheek. Before she can react, he’s kissing her.

Her fingers curl around the collar of his jacket. It’s a  _good_  kiss, soft and slow, the pressure of his mouth against hers just enough that she knows there’s a promise of more if she wants it.

And she does want it, she realizes, her eyes still closed as he breaks the kiss, his nose brushing against hers gently.

Her mouth curls up into a smile as her eyes flutter open. “Jug,” she breathes. “What…?”

The breath he lets out is a little shaky, but he smiles too when he looks at her. “You were right,” he says. “Five years is a  _really_  long time.”


	10. i think this room is bugged.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh yeah, in case you're wondering - i'm on tumblr at imreallyloveleee, and these are all prompts i'm filling after hitting 500 followers. come say hi! :)

“There.” Jughead places a framed photo of Betty and Polly on top of the dresser with a flourish, next to some spare change, a stray sock, and a lot of dust. “Feel like home?”

Betty pulls her knees up to her chest, watching him from her perch on the bed. _Her_ bed. _Their_ bed. She isn’t really sure what to call it.

She gives him the brightest smile she can manage, though the truth is she’s felt a lump in the pit of her stomach ever since he’d driven her back to her family’s house last night to pack up her toiletries and a week’s worth of clothes. Her mother hadn’t been home, but Chic had, and she could only imagine what he’d told Alice she had said as she’d thrown sweaters and t-shirts and underwear into her bag, Jughead hovering protectively by the doorway all the while. Less than twenty-four hours later, Betty has six new voicemails and a slew of unread texts she can’t bear to open on her phone.

Now Jughead sits beside her on the bed, rubbing his hand up and down her back. “I’m sorry it’s not for a better reason,” he says quietly. “You moving in like this.”

She rests her head on his shoulder. “I’m not sure there’s ever a _good_ reason to move in with your boyfriend in high school.”

“That’s probably true.”

Betty turns her head so that her lips just barely brush against his neck, and she feels his hand fall still against her lower back. “Do you feel okay? After sleeping on the sofa?”

Jughead nods, slipping the tips of his fingers beneath the hem of her shirt. The light touch feels good, and she shifts against him so he can move his hand up further, warm against her skin.

“I’m fine.”

“You shouldn’t have to do that every night.” She pulls away slightly so she can meet his eyes. “We can take turns, or something.”

Betty hadn’t really considered their sleeping situation when she’d asked him to let her stay at the trailer. She’d spent the night in his bed before; it was big enough for the two of them to fit comfortably. But FP had been in jail then, and not merely a single wall away. He’d agreed to let Betty stay on one condition: Jughead took the couch.

“No, no. Seriously, it’s fine. I think he’ll relent once he gets tired of tiptoeing around so he doesn’t wake me up in the middle of the night.” Jughead leans in close again, his fingers finding the clasp of her bra, toying with it. “For now, though…he’s at work until at least eight.”

Betty accepts his kiss – she doesn’t think she’s capable of _not_ doing that – but when he wraps his arms around her middle and starts to haul her onto his lap, she stops him with a hand on his chest.

“Are you sure? I kind of feel like…well, it’s been less than a day, and it’s so nice of your dad to even let me stay here, and I don’t want to be disrespectful –”

“Betts, he doesn’t care,” Jughead interrupts, a half-smile on his face. “He’s just making us sleep in separate rooms so when your mom inevitably shows up at the door with a shotgun, he’s got plausible deniability.”

Betty gasps. “Oh god.”

He tilts his head. “I’m just kidding.”

“No, I forgot to tell you – with everything that was happening –” Betty sighs, slumping against him. “My mom _knows_.”

“Knows…you’re here?” Jughead shrugs. “I mean, eventually she’d have to…”

“No. She knows we’re having sex. _Chic_ told her,” she says, imbuing his name with as much venom as she can muster.

Her boyfriend looks puzzled, adorably so, enough that it’s almost enough to extinguish the little flame of rage once again roiling in her gut. “But…how does Chic know?”

“I have no idea. I think this room is bugged, or something,” she mutters darkly.

“We never even did it at your house. Well, I guess there was that one time…but we thought no one was home…”

“He _claims_ that he was just guessing. And he caught me completely off-guard, so I couldn’t deny it.” Betty presses her forehead against his shoulder for a moment. “I don’t know. She seemed upset, and then less upset once I said we were being safe.”

Jughead squeezes her lightly around the waist. “That’s…good?”

“She’s still definitely going to murder you the next time she sees you. _Also_ , she said your dad and her used to…like…be a thing.”

Betty shudders. She still isn’t sure whether the “allure” Alice referred to was of an emotional nature, or merely physical. And she isn’t sure what would be worse: the former implying that it might have been something her mother still thought about sometimes, might be something that could happen again, in some undefined future; the latter implying a whole boatload of other things she did not want to know about her mom.

Jughead shrugs again. “Well, we knew that.” He frowns as her eyes widen. “We knew that, right?”

Betty’s eyebrows shoot up so high she thinks her face muscles might be sore the next day. “ _I_ did not know that.”

“Betty. It was so obvious. When we picked him up from prison? Or when he agreed to _dispose of a dead body for her?_ ”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because I thought you knew! And because it’s gross!”

His last point, at least, is one she can’t argue with.

Betty makes a face and tugs at the strings of his hoodie. “Okay, now I definitely don’t feel like having sex.”

Jughead laughs, and hugs her tightly for a moment, pressing his face into her hair. “Me neither. Want to watch a movie?”

She nods. “Something funny. Something my mom would hate.”

Jughead only has to think for a second. “The Big Lebowski.”

“Perfect.”


	11. if we both stick to the story, they can't prove anything.

Just before they turn the corner, Kevin grabs the sleeve of Jughead’s jacket, pulling him to a stop. “You sure you don’t want me to just hang back here for a few minutes?”

Jughead rolls his eyes. “Yes. It’s fine.”

“I really don’t mind being a few minutes late.”

“Look, if we both stick to the story, they can’t prove anything. I ran into you on the subway and we walked over here together. The end.”

Kevin relents with a shake of his head, and they continue to walk towards the restaurant where they’re meeting Betty and Veronica for lunch. “They don’t have to _prove_ anything. _Suspicion_ is enough.”

“They’re not going to suspect anything,” Jughead grinds out. “It’s not _that_ weird that we’d show up together.”

Except it sort of is, because as the past two and a half hours have reminded him, Jughead finds solo time with Kevin to be rather…exhausting.

Kevin hadn’t been his first choice. That had been Veronica – until Jughead had thought about it for more than ten seconds, and realized that not only would she probably steer him towards something well out of his price range, but there was also no way she’d be able to keep it a secret from Archie for longer than a day or two. (And once Archie knew…then it was only a matter of hours before Betty herself knew.)

Polly was out: she was desperate for any break from the twins these days, and would likely turn what should be a one- to two-hour activity into an all-day excursion in the city, assuming she could find a babysitter. (Bringing the twins themselves along was _not_ an option.)

(Neither was Betty’s mother. Yikes.)

But Kevin? Kevin was tolerable. Kevin could keep a secret. Kevin knew Betty’s tastes.

He was, Jughead figured, a suitable (if not ideal) companion for ring shopping.  

And though Jughead thought he had a decent sense of what Betty Cooper might want in an engagement ring – something tasteful, with enough sparkle to catch the eye, but not too big or flashy – Kevin’s advice had been helpful. Like: despite Betty’s lifelong affinity for the color pink, to avoid anything made of rose gold, which would look dated in five years.

Or: that it really was okay to get her something without a diamond; she hadn’t just said that one time two years ago, when Veronica’s then-boyfriend had (unsuccessfully) proposed, to make him feel better about the fact that he didn’t have thousands to drop on a single piece of jewelry.

Ultimately, it had been a productive morning, as they’d narrowed it down to two choices, either of which Jughead was pretty sure Betty would be okay with wearing for the rest of her life. (Assuming she said yes. _Oh, god_ , he hoped she’d say yes.)

Betty and Veronica are already seated by the time they arrive at the restaurant. “Well look at you two,” Veronica drawls as they take their seats, Jughead leaning across the table to give Betty a peck on the lips. “Did you have a breakfast date we didn’t know about?”

“We just ran into each other on the subway,” Jughead says, at the exact same time that Kevin says, “sidewalk.”

Jughead stares at Kevin, who immediately begins to fuss with his napkin, folding it this way and that before draping it over his lap. “The sidewalk outside the subway entrance,” Kevin continues. “So funny. We were on the same train but I didn’t even notice I was behind Jughead until he dropped his wallet, and then I _literally_ ran into him when he bent over to pick it up. And I was like, oh, duh, should have recognized that sherpa jacket anywhere!”

Despite an entire childhood living with an officer of the law, Kevin had clearly never picked up on the fact that the best alibi was the one with the fewest, and least ridiculous, details.

Jughead merely nods, studying his menu with great interest. “Yup.”

Veronica and Betty exchange a look. “That’s weird,” Betty says slowly.

Jughead looks up abruptly, trying to hide his alarm. “Why?”

“Because you normally have your wallet on a chain,” she points out with a small shrug.

His wallet is, in fact, currently nestled in his back pocket, securely attached to a wallet chain. Jughead swallows.

“Yeah, it was actually my phone I dropped.”

“Haha, yeah, duh, that’s what I meant,” Kevin adds. “They’re practically the same size. Easy mistake.” It takes all of the self-control Jughead possesses not to kick him under the table.

Betty looks at Veronica again, but seems willing to let it go. “Ronnie, tell them about what Archie did this morning.”

Veronica launches into a story about her boyfriend’s ongoing battle with the fancy espresso machine her parents had gifted them for Christmas, and the rest of their lunch proceeds smoothly, subway-sidewalk mishaps forgotten.

At least it seems that way, until they’ve paid the bill.

As they stand up and shrug on their jackets, the girls in a hurry to make their mani-pedi appointment a few blocks south, Betty cups her hand around the back of Jughead’s neck as she leans in for a goodbye kiss. It’s soft and sweet, and instead of pulling away, she whispers into his ear after they break the kiss:

“Remember, I’m a size five.”

With a firm kiss on his cheek and an impish wink, she flounces out the door, Veronica at her heels.

And in that moment, Jughead doesn’t have the heart to be mad at Kevin for blowing their cover. Because if she wants the ring to fit – he’s pretty sure of her answer when he finally asks the question.


	12. i might take my chances with the lightning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> set after Chic moves out of the Cooper household, but before the musical happens.

“It’s almost eleven.”

Betty’s heart sinks at her boyfriend’s words. “I don’t wanna go,” she mumbles, fiddling absently with the straw of her milkshake.

Beneath her shoulder she can feel the soft rumble of a laugh in Jughead’s chest. “I know. But it’s your curfew,” he points out, rubbing a comforting hand up and down her arm.

He’s right. She knows he’s right. And with Chic out of the house now, she no longer dreads returning home each day, tiptoeing through her own front door and up the stairs in near-silence, praying that she’ll make it all the way to her bedroom undetected.

It’s just – she misses this. Misses _him._ With opening night just a week away, it feels like the musical has taken over their lives: Betty in constant rehearsal and costume fittings, Jughead capturing it all through the lens of his camcorder. They’ve had barely any time to spend together, much less alone (if one can call the corner booth at Pop’s on a Saturday night a place to be “alone”).

They pay the bill and make their way to Jughead’s motorcycle in the parking lot. Betty feels the first raindrop, cool and wet against the back of her wrist just as she’s slipping his helmet onto her head.

“Hope we beat that home,” Jughead mutters, tilting his chin up to look at the sky.

She hums in agreement and straddles the seat of the bike behind him, wrapping her arms firmly around his middle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despite Jughead’s best efforts to reach the Cooper house quickly – including a shortcut through an alleyway Betty hadn’t even known existed – the rain picks up almost immediately, and they’re both drenched by the time he pulls into the driveway.

Betty slips the helmet off, but rather than place it into Jughead’s outstretched hand, she tucks it beneath her arm. He wiggles his fingers expectantly. “C’mon, Betts, I’m getting soaked.”

“Come inside,” she says.

Jughead squints up at her. “What?”

“Come inside,” she repeats, and grabs his damp, clammy hand.

“What about your mom?”

Betty shrugs. If her mother catches them coming in, she’ll make Jughead sleep on the couch. If not…it’s been a while since she had him alone in her bedroom.

Some things, she thinks, are worth the risk.

A clap of thunder booms from the sky, followed not long after by a jagged crack of lightning to the east. “Juggie,” she says, letting a hint of a whine creep into her voice.

With a shake of his head, Jughead swings his leg over the seat and flips the kickstand down with his heel. “Okay, but if she sees me come in I might take my chances with the lightning.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Betty shuts the bedroom door carefully as Jughead crosses the room to switch on her bedside lamp. They’d made it inside undetected, and the empty wine glass left beside the kitchen sink suggests Alice Cooper won’t be up and about until breakfast time, at best.

He turns his head to look at her, a lock of damp, dark hair hanging across his eyes, and her stomach erupts with butterflies.

Betty tugs off her boots, leaving them by the door, and moves closer as he shrugs off his wet sherpa jacket and lays it over the back of her desk chair. She stops by the end of her bed, brushing her fingertips over the soft pink-and-white comforter, and watches him wring out the bottom of his damp t-shirt, droplets falling onto the carpet.

“Take off your clothes,” she says.

Jughead freezes and looks up at her, a smirk spreading slowly across his face. “What has gotten into you tonight?” he asks, even as his fingers move to the button of his jeans.

Betty only shrugs, shifting on her feet, letting the side of her mouth curl up into a half-smile to match his own.

Jughead takes his time, stepping out of his pants one leg at a time before he lays his jeans out on the window seat to dry, followed by his t-shirt. In nothing but his boxer briefs, he turns back to face her, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Your turn.”

She undresses quickly, her sweater joining her jeans in a puddle on the floor, not bothering to lay them out the way he had – she’ll take care of it tomorrow. A lick of heat races up her spine when she lifts her eyes to meet his, sees how dark they’ve grown as he watches her.

She isn’t sure who moves first, but the distance between them evaporates, his breath hot against her forehead.

“You’re so cold,” he says when he touches her, fingertips skimming over her ribcage, around to her back, pulling her against him. The skin of his stomach feels strangely cool against hers, and she twists closer, craving the warmth she’s accustomed to.

“I’ve missed you,” she murmurs.

They stumble to the bed and crawl beneath the covers, and she’s smiling when he finally, _finally_ kisses her. She lets him roll her onto her back, hitching a leg over his hip as he moves from her mouth to her neck, dropping her head back with a sigh.

“We have to be quiet,” she whispers.

“Not a problem for me,” he says, and then presses his fingers against her through her underwear, against the spot where he knows she’s most sensitive, making her yelp. His other hand finds her cheek, and his thumb presses against her lips, as though to keep her quiet. It feels…aggressive, she decides, and her body practically hums in reaction, a dizzy burst of pleasure flooding through her at his touch. “You, though…”

“Stop,” she half-giggles, half-moans. She nips at his thumb, which he pulls away as he settles over her, leaning on his arm for support. “I’m serious.”

“Me too,” he insists, peppering kisses along her jaw, her neck. “I’m very serious.”

Betty presses her palm against him, heat simmering low in her belly. Jughead stifles a groan against her shoulder, pushing lightly into her hand, and she grins, running her other hand up his back.

“Yeah, you _feel_ serious,” she teases.

It doesn’t take long to shed what’s left of their underthings. She digs a condom out from the drawer of her bedside table, and buries her face into her pillow to muffle her own sounds when he begins to move inside of her.

“You feel _good_ ,” she sighs.

They’re both so keyed up that it doesn’t take long for the both of them to fall over the edge, panting into one another’s mouths, flushed skin against her floral sheets. Afterwards Betty sucks in a shaky breath, limbs loose and warm in the comedown, running her fingertips along his side.

“Fuck,” Jughead exhales, flopping onto his back beside her. “Betts, this – it feels better every time.”

Betty stretches her legs out beneath the covers, snuggling into his side. “I know.”

“I should listen when you tell me to come inside.” He pauses, and the double entendre hits her a moment later. She snorts, kicking his shin half-heartedly with one foot.

“You’re so lame.”

Jughead smiles up at the ceiling. “And yet here I am. Naked in your bed. Going nowhere.”

“For now.” But Betty smiles, too, and presses her lips to his shoulder before she leans over him to switch off the lamp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> these are all prompt fills i'm posting on tumblr. this one in particular was not a quote, but a request for Bughead caught in the rain, plus some smut.
> 
> i'm at imreallyloveleee - come say hi! :)


	13. a lot can go down in five minutes.

Veronica yawns, bumping her arm against Betty’s shoulder as she stretches. They’re lying side by side on Betty’s bed, nearly three hours deep into an SAT study session, notebooks and flashcards strewn out on the comforter around them. Archie’s hunched over a textbook at Betty’s desk, and Jughead scowls down at his laptop from his perch in the window seat, the occasional tapping of keys the only sound in the room other than the soft rustling of paper and pens.

It’s late September, and t-minus two weeks until their test date. The light filtering into the room has a hazy, almost golden quality to it, as though they’re living in a moment already steeped with nostalgia.

And maybe they are, Betty thinks; who knows how many more moments they’ll have like this one, quiet, comfortable,  _together?_

Then she yawns, too, and laughs. “It’s contagious,” she groans.

Veronica smiles, laying her head on her forearm as she looks up at Betty. “Mm. Sorry.”

“I’m hungry.” Archie sighs heavily, tipping Betty’s desk chair dangerously far onto its back two wheels.

Jughead lowers his laptop screen, propping one knee up against the window. “You guys want to get Pop’s? It’s almost six.”

Veronica sits up so quickly Betty fears she might give herself whiplash. “It’s  _six_? Archibald, we need to go.”

Archie regards her blankly for a moment, and then his eyes grow wide. His chair drops back down on all fours. “Oh, yeah. Shit.”

Betty sits up, too, swinging her legs over the side of the bed to give Veronica room as she gathers her scattered papers, shoving them into her leather tote. “What’s wrong?”

“We’re having dinner with my parents tonight.” Veronica swings her bag over her shoulder and taps her foot impatiently. “You still need to get changed, Archie.”

They’re still arguing about whether or not Archie’s letterman jacket is appropriate for a jacket-required dress code as they leave, Betty’s bedroom door slamming shut behind them. She meets Jughead’s eyes across the room and giggles.

“Wow,” he deadpans, turning back to his laptop.

“Yeah.” Betty bites her lower lip, letting her gaze fall back to the vocabulary list in front of her, feeling suddenly awkward. She’s never actually been alone in her bedroom with Jughead before.

But she  _has_ imagined it.

And in her daydreams he’s a lot closer than he is now – say, on the bed with her, and not five feet away, curled up in her window seat.

Betty makes a genuine attempt to focus her mind on her studies, but after failing to comprehend a single word of the definition of  _ignominious_  despite reading it five times in a row, she gives in. “If you’re hungry, we could still go to Pop’s,” she says casually.

She chances a glance at Jughead; he’s nodding slowly, closing his computer as he shifts in his seat to face her. “Yeah, I could go for a cheeseburger,” he says. “Or three.”

Betty grins. “Let me just text my parents.”

“Oh.” Jughead seems perplexed by this statement. “They’re not home?”

“They’re at the Register. Sunday’s a double issue, so they’re usually a little late on Saturdays.” She snorts. “You think if my mom was home, she’d let us keep the door closed while we’re up here alone?”

Jughead shrugs. “Why not?”

Betty stares at him for a moment, unsure if he’s joking – if he is, he’s excellent at keeping a straight face.

“Well, because – you know. She thinks boys and girls alone in a bedroom means they’re, you know.” She pauses, and when he says nothing, adds, “Doing stuff.”

She knows he gets it when the tips of his ears flush red. “Oh. Right.”

“Not because, like, it’s specifically  _you_ ,” Betty assures him, and then realizes how that sounds. “Not that – not that I  _wouldn’t_  with you.” Oh, god, that sounds even worse.

“I mean –”

Jughead’s blush has expanded from his ears to his neck, but there’s also a hint of amusement in the curve of his mouth. “It’s okay, I get it. No boys allowed.”

Betty presses her lips together, determined to say not another embarrassing word about it, and nods.

“So, Pop’s? You gonna…?” He casts a meaningful eye at her phone, still clutched in her hand.

“I’m sure it’s fine. Let’s go.” Betty practically leaps off of her bed, eager to get out of this room and put the entire exchange behind them.

But Jughead’s long stride means he still somehow beats her to the door.

“So hang on,” he says. “Am I the  _first_ boy you’ve had up in your room?”

Betty’s fairly certain that all of the blood in her entire body is rushing to her head right now. “No. My mom doesn’t care if it’s Kevin.” She shrugs. “Anyway, you were only in here for like, five minutes with me.”

“Well, a lot can go down in five minutes.”

Her eyes widen. “What?”

Jughead’s entire neck is still the color of an underripe strawberry, but he smiles. “Betty, it’s a joke.”

“Oh.” Her breath lets out in a jittery laugh, and she presses her palms to her face for a moment. Her skin feels hot beneath her fingertips. “I’m sorry, I’m – I need to eat. I must have low blood sugar or something.”

“Let’s get you a milkshake,” he says, reaching past her for the doorknob.

He hesitates, his other hand other coming up to tug at the edge of his beanie as he looks at her sidelong. “For the record, though,” he adds, “I wouldn’t… _not_ with you, either.”

Jughead pushes the door open before she can say anything, and thuds down the stairs with his usual heavy footsteps. Betty trails behind him, a nervous, eager smile playing at her lips, heart pounding in her chest.

He’s not the first boy she’s ever had alone in her room.

But she wants him to be the next. And she’s pretty sure he does, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: a non murder au and everyone is studying for the SATs and Bughead are pining for each other


	14. i wanted to do that so many times.

There’s this moment between them:

He knocks on her window, and climbs into her room, and his hand is on her shoulder and she thinks – _maybe. Maybe._

But it passes; his eyes flicker away, and she remembers a car in the woods, and there are more important things to be thinking about right now. She tells herself it’s nothing.

(It feels like something.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

It comes back at the oddest times. When he sits beside her in the student lounge, no closer than usual, yet it feels like there’s some kind of current prickling in the space between her skin and his. When she faces him across the cracked formica table in the police station, her fingers ghosting along his wrist.

Veronica picks up on it, too. She stops Betty in the hallway after class, her mouth smiling, her eyes questioning. _Are you two…?_

 _No,_ Betty says. She shakes her head. _It’s nothing._

And then Archie tells her it’s his birthday. She reaches as far back into her memory as she can, searching for cupcakes, party hats, _anything,_ but she comes up blank and grasping. It’s not that she’s forgotten; it’s that she never knew.

Archie warns her that he won’t want the party. She plans it anyway. She takes his usual spot beside Jughead at the double feature – he would never believe that Archie is too scared to sit through the second half of _An American Werewolf in London_ – and they share a popcorn, her knee just barely touching his thigh, so close in the old movie theater seats.

He seems nervous. She _feels_ nervous. When they reach for popcorn at the same time, he pulls his hand away like he’s been burned. (Maybe he has been. She swears she feels her skin tingle where they touched; maybe he’s feeling this thing between them even more intensely than she is.)

She tells him she wants to go home, and he doesn’t protest, doesn’t hesitate, just helps her gather their half-empty sodas and places his hand on the back of her coat as they shuffle out towards the exit.

But she can tell, the moment they walk through Archie’s door to cries of _happy birthday, Jughead_ , that she’s made a mistake. His face falls, his words are flat. They eat cake and then he disappears upstairs, claiming he needs to grab something from Archie’s room.

Betty excuses herself to the kitchen and she leans against the counter, arms crossed over her chest, willing herself not to cry. Veronica finds her there, offers her a sip of her vodka soda, and drinks it herself when Betty shakes her head.

“Just go talk to him, B.” Her eyes are glassy – clearly they’d busted out the key to the liquor cabinet some time before Betty and Jughead arrived. But there’s a clarity there, too, a simple answer Betty knows to be true.

_Just talk to him._

 

 

 

 

 

 

He’s lying on his back on Archie’s bed, staring at the ceiling, his beanie tossed onto the bedside table. He sits up when she enters the room, straightens up as she closes the door.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She sits beside him on the soft, worn comforter, and she thinks fleetingly of how many times she’d yearned to sit here just like this, with another boy beside her. How glad she is that it’s _this_ boy instead, even if he’s mad at her.

 “Don’t be sorry,” he says. “I kind of…freak out when somebody does something nice for me.”

She takes his hand. His palm is surprisingly soft; she lets her fingers run across it, and presses her other hand over top of his. She looks up, and realizes how close his face is to hers. His eyes, his mouth.

“I was excited when,” he pauses, swallowing, “when I thought it was just going to be us.”

Betty’s heart pounds so hard she’s certain her body is vibrating along with it. “It’s just us now.”

He smiles, but she only has a second to appreciate it because then his mouth touches hers, he’s _kissing_ her, and her eyes fall shut and she leans into him and squeezes his hand between her own.

When he pulls away her head tilts towards him, eyes still closed, lashes fluttering. She opens them and he’s looking at her with an expression so gentle she thinks she could curl up in it and fall asleep.

“I wanted to do that so many times,” he tells her.

“I wanted you to,” she admits.

 _I want you to do it again,_ she thinks, and almost as though he can read her mind, he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> based on a prompt from Raptorlily: "you mentioned before you might have gotten bughead together on the show a different way, what would you have done differently with their relationship in s1?"
> 
> (another answer is the entirety of my fic _boy problems_ , lol)


	15. i liked that a little too much, that's all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the prompt for this one was two tropes: Huddling for Warmth + I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On.

Jughead shoves his phone into his pocket and turns back to Betty, his brow creased into a frown. “The sheriff’ll be here in twenty,” he says. “He said we should wait for him.”

“Okay.” Betty nods, wrapping her arms around her middle as a chill runs through her. Now that the adrenaline of finding the car has worn off, the prospect of standing around in the middle of a thunderstorm for twenty minutes is less than appealing. She’s wet, and cold, and just beginning to realize that Polly may be involved in way,  _way_ more serious shit than teen pregnancy and a thwarted elopement.

“C’mere.” Jughead takes her hand and pulls her a few feet uphill, stopping beside the wide, gnarled trunk of an old maple tree. The leaves shield them from some, but not all, of the rain.

It’s when she starts to move her hand away, only for Jughead to tighten his grip on it, that she remembers:  _oh, right._

Jughead  _kissed_ her.

And  _she_  kissed him  _back_.

She glances up at him through damp lashes; he’s gazing back at her with a look so much like the one he’d given her earlier in her bedroom that another shiver runs through her, though this time it has much more to do with the pleasant warmth expanding in her chest than it does the rain.

His mouth quirks in concern. “You cold?” he asks, and without waiting for an answer, wraps his arms around her shoulders, pulling her awkwardly into his chest.

To be honest, he’s not transferring a lot of heat. His sherpa jacket was a bad choice for this particular adventure, as it’s now completely soaked through with the rain. But his touch sends her heart racing, her stomach fluttering. Betty bites her lower lip, hesitates, and then circles her own arms around his torso, slipping them beneath his jacket so her hands rest right against the fabric of his t-shirt.

It’s both less and more awkward like this: to be sure, she fits much better against his chest this way, her head slotting in neatly beneath his chin.

But there’s also the not-insignificant fact that as soon as she’s snuggled up against him, Jughead takes in a sharp breath and stiffens, his back muscles twitching under her fingertips.

He steps back slightly, placing his hands on her elbows, holding her a few inches away. “Sorry, um…”

“No, I’m sorry, I – I guess I just thought…” Betty gazes up at him. “I thought we kind of had a moment, before, and so…I don’t know.”

“No, yeah, we – we  _did,_ ” he stumbles over the words. “It’s not – god, Betty, I – I just, I liked that a little too much, that’s all.”

She doesn’t really understand what he means, and then she follows his quick glance down towards his jeans, and –  _oh._

_OH._

“Oh.” Betty presses her hands against her cheeks, which feel like they’re on fire. “I’m…sorry?”

Jughead laughs. “Don’t be. It’s just, um. Maybe something better explored when Kevin’s dad isn’t about to barge in.”

Her eyes widen – it’s by far the most forward thing Jughead’s ever said to her. And she kind of likes it.

“Maybe when we’re not in the woods,” she agrees, and feels her heart flip at the grin that spreads across his face to match her own.


	16. i had a nightmare about you, and i just wanted to make sure you were okay.

Betty wakes up with a start, her heart racing. Her hair is in her eyes, and when she brushes it away from her forehead, her palm comes away damp and clammy.

The alarm clock says it’s nearly three in the morning, but Jughead answers his phone after just two rings. “Betty? What’s wrong?”

_Nothing_ , she thinks, her pulse slowing at the sound of his voice.  _You answered._

“Nothing’s wrong. Hi.” She curls onto her side, pushing the comforter off of her legs with her feet. A dark splotch of sweat trails down from the neckline of her camisole. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry,” she says before he can answer.

“No, it’s fine,” he mumbles. “What’s going on?”

Betty hesitates for only a second. She doesn’t lie to Jughead. (Not anymore.) And there is a small – but not insignificant – part of her that  _wants_ him to know. “I had a nightmare about you, and I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“Oh.” The single syllable contains so much guilt. “I am. I’m fine.” There’s a pause, and then he says, “Do you want to come over?”

Jughead is sitting on the steps of the trailer when she arrives on her bike, the fuzzy plaid blanket that normally rests on the back of the sofa draped over his shoulders instead. He holds his arm out for her when she joins him, wrapping the blanket around the both of them as she snuggles into his side.

“Hi,” he says softly. He presses his nose against her hair and breathes in deeply before bending down to peck her on the lips.

Betty looks at his face for only a moment – it’s too painful, even weeks later, to see the scabs and scratches that mar his forehead, the bruise on his jaw that’s faded to a sickly, mottled yellow. She rests her head in the crook between his neck and his shoulder, careful not to disturb the bandage still wrapped around his upper arm.  

“You shouldn’t be out here,” she says softly. “It’s chilly.”

“I’m not  _sick_.” He sounds like he’s smiling, but she doesn’t check to see.

“You’re recovering.”

“Fresh air’s good for healing,” Jughead says. “And I don’t want to wake up my dad.”

“Mm,” she concedes.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he says after a minute or two of silence.

“The nightmare? No.” Betty shakes her head.

“But you want to talk about something.”

She does, and she doesn’t. It is, obviously, the reason why she’s here, sitting on his stoop at 3 a.m.; they both know they need to talk about the thing they’ve been skirting around, the thing that’s been keeping her up at night – the thing he did. But it’s so quiet and peaceful, here in the trailer park in the middle of the night, the moon full and shining above them.

“I’m mad at you,” she says finally, slowly, feeling out the words as she says them. They feel awful, but they feel right. They feel…true.

Beside her, Jughead stiffens. He pulls his arm from where it’s curled around her, taking care not to pull the blanket off of her shoulders. “Okay.”

“What you did –”

She can’t bring herself to say it, isn’t even sure how she  _would_ say it. Did he  _know_  there would be so many of them? That they would kick him and punch him and beat him and drag him, leave him lying in the woods to bleed to death?

He did, she thinks. Of course he did. How else to explain the phone call?

“— it was selfish.”

He drags his hand down the side of his face. “Selfish.”

“Yes.”

His laugh is jagged, harsh. “I’ll admit I don’t see it that way.”

“I know you don’t.”

“What do you want me to say, Betty?” He sounds exhausted.

_That you love memore than them._

_That our future is more important to you than theirs._

_That you **want**  one with me._

All at once her vision goes cloudy. “I don’t know.” She wipes at her eyes with the cuff of her sweater.

“Oh, Betts. Don’t cry.” His arm slips around her again, his other hand lifting to cup her cheek. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m sorry, okay?” He wipes a tear from her cheek. “I love you.”

She lets him comfort her, because she’s too tired to keep arguing. Because it’s past 3 a.m., and only getting later, and she has to be back in her own bed before her mother gets up at 5. Because when he says it –  _I love you_ , the soft, gravelly dip of his voice, the way his fingers dig into her skin – she knows that he means it.

(But he meant it all the other times, too. It’s never been a question of  _if._

Now it will always be:  _how much?_ )


	17. what are these?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: send me the first sentence and i'll write the next 5+.

“What are these?” she asks, holding out her hand. “They were on the bathroom sink.”

Jughead spares only a moment’s glance at the crinkled little pieces of plastic in her palm. “Oh. My contacts. Sorry, I must have forgotten to throw ‘em in the trash.”

Betty wrinkles her nose and shakes her hand, letting them fall onto the open pages of his textbook. “Ew. Wait – you wear _contacts?_ Every day?”

He nods.

“Since when?”

“Uh…I think like, eighth grade.”

“ _Eighth grade?!”_

Her reaction, he feels, is somewhat dramatic given the subject matter. “What? Are you worried our future children won’t have perfect 20/20 vision?”

(He tries to ignore the little flutter that erupts in his chest as he says it. They’ve never really _discussed_ it, but – as graduation gets closer and closer, they’ve been talking more casually about the future, and – well. It’s not like he’s never thought about it, anyway.)

Betty, for her part, appears too bewildered by this revelation to even notice. “No, I just – Jughead. We’ve been dating for _three years_ , how did I not know you wear contacts?”

Jughead shrugs. “I don’t know, was I supposed to…tell you…?”

“No – maybe? It’s just weird. I thought…I thought I knew everything about you.”

She sounds so _sad_ about something so silly that it’s all he can do not to laugh. He stands up from his chair and wraps his arms around her, smiling against the crown of her head as she sags against him, her hands sliding up his back.

“I am an open book, Betty Cooper,” he murmurs against her ear. “Ask me anything.”

Betty pulls back to meet his gaze, a glint in her eye. “Okay…first things first. Are all those teeth really yours?”


	18. let's grab breakfast at pop's before we hit the road!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: send me the first sentence and i'll write the next 5+.

He blinks once at Archie, silhouetted in the doorway with an overstuffed duffel slung over one shoulder, twice at Fred's old truck parked in front of the trailer, and three full times when Archie says, "C'mon, Jug, let's grab breakfast at Pop's before we hit the road!"

Jughead rubs his hands over his face, praying his best friend can’t tell that his heart is pounding like a madman’s right now. “Arch, are you aware that it’s…” He glances at the microwave behind him. “Seven a.m.?”

Archie shrugs the shoulder that isn’t currently weighed down by a duffel bag the size of a fifth-grader. “I’ll drive first, you can sleep in the car.”

“I haven’t, y’know, actually _packed_ yet.” It’s not the cause of Jughead’s panic – it doesn’t take long to throw four days’ worth of t-shirts and underwear into a backpack – but it happens to be conveniently true.

“I’ll help!” Archie moves in the direction of the bedroom, but Jughead leaps to the side, blocking his path before he can take another step.

“I – just give me five minutes. No, ten,” he amends. “It’s…it’s a mess back there. Wait in the car. Or you could go pick something up from Pop’s? Eat on the road?”

A tiny crease has formed in the center of Archie’s forehead – a rare but sure sign that he’s suspicious. “Yeah, okay.” Archie frowns, craning his neck a little as he peers down the hallway, and Jughead sends a silent prayer of thanks to whatever mysterious force made him shut the bedroom door on his way out.

Because the very last thing he wants to kick off their Fourth of July roadtrip with is Archie discovering that Betty Cooper is in his best friend’s bed.

Or that Jughead’s been hooking up with her all summer.


	19. um - bonjour?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: send me the first sentence and i'll write the next 5+.

This used to be their favorite spot. Milkshakes, burgers, onion rings – and that was just the food.

The _memories_ were what made it a truly special place. It was where they’d gone on their first date. Had their first kiss. Fallen in love.

Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe was an _institution_ , dammit.

If it all sounds a little dramatic – well, Jughead thinks he’s earned the right to be. Because after a miserable four-hour drive from campus back down to Riverdale for winter break, all he’d wanted was to collapse into one of those familiar, squishy booths with his girlfriend by his side, a doo-wop tune from the jukebox in his ear, and a triple-stacked cheeseburger at his fingertips.

Instead, he and Betty are standing in the parking lot, bundled up in their warmest winter coats, staring in disbelief at what appears to be a cocktail bar.

A cocktail bar with _a valet stand._

“Are you sure we didn’t, like…get…lost somehow?” Betty turns in a slow circle, her feet crunching on the gravel.

Jughead shakes his head. “Not possible. The way to Pop’s is tattooed on the back of my eyelids, Betts.”

Her eyes widen. “Oh! What if it’s one of those pop-up things? Like the bagel shop they opened up in the pub on Broad Street that one time?”

The thought of Pop Tate doing something as stupid and stereotypically _millennial_ as hosting a pop-up cocktail bar chills him to the bone. But before Jughead can say so, a familiar pick-up truck turns into the lot behind them, drawing their attention away from the glossy marquee where the Pop’s logo used to sit.

Betty threads her arm through Jughead’s, snuggling up to his side. “There’s Archie. He’ll know what’s going on.”

Archie emerges from behind the wheel and jogs around to the passenger’s side, where he holds the door open for a dark-haired woman who hops delicately to the ground. Right – Archie’s new girlfriend, Vivian or Violet or whatever. In his despair and confusion, Jughead had completely forgotten they were supposed to meet her tonight.

“Hey guys!”

They echo back the greeting as Archie and his girlfriend approach. Out of nowhere, she throws her arms up in the air, revealing herself to be wearing not a coat, as Jughead had thought, but a cape. An actual _cape._

“ _Bienvenue_ _à La Bonne Nuit_!” she exclaims, face alight in almost manic glee.

A quick glance at Betty’s face reassures Jughead that he’s not the only one who doesn’t know what the hell is going on. Or that Archie’s new girlfriend was _French_ and yet choosing to live in Riverdale, New York, for some inexplicable reason _._

“Um – _bonjour_?” Betty ventures.

“Guys, this is Veronica.” Archie wraps his arm around Veronica’s waist, grinning, his cheeks ruddy and red in the cold night air. “And this is her brand new bar!”


	20. are you hiding in the stairwell?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: send me the first sentence and i'll write the next 5+.

Jughead pulls to an abrupt stop before he collides with Betty, where she’s sitting alone on the stairs. “Are you hiding in the stairwell?”

She looks up at him surprise, nearly dropping her phone in the process. “Oh. Hi. Ah – sort of.”

She doesn’t appear upset, but Jughead knows better than most that there are a multitude of reasons for one to try and find some solitude in the middle of their noisy, bustling high school. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then.”

As he continues down the stairs, Betty hooks a finger through one of the suspender straps hanging from his jeans. “No, wait. Stay.” She waits for him to take a step back up, then asks, “Can I tell you something?”

Jughead settles onto the step beside her, keeping a careful distance between them: not too far, not too close. “That depends.”

Her little smile tells him she’ll play along. “On what?”

“Oh, you know.” Jughead looks up to the ceiling, which is covered in years-old graffiti that the school has never bothered to cover up. “Is it a secret? Some kind of, ‘if-I-tell-you-I-have-to-kill-you’ situation?”

Betty knocks her knee against his. “ _No._ ”

“Then no. I don’t want to know.”

“Juggie.” She giggles, and then lets out a long breath. “I got into Cornell. They just sent the emails out.”

His whole heart swells for her: it had been her top choice, but also the most selective of the schools she’d applied to, and he knows she’d been worried about her chances of getting in. “Betty! That’s awesome. Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” She bites her lower lip and turns towards him, eyes shining; he wonders, as he’s been doing often lately, what would happen if he just leaned over and kissed her.

But just like every other time the urge has caught hold of him, Jughead steadies himself, and lets it pass. He lifts one arm to gesture vaguely about the stairwell. “So what are you doing down here?”

Betty shrugs. “I just wanted to take a moment to myself. Enjoy it before I have to start listening to everybody’s stupid ‘Ithaca-is-gorges’ jokes.” A faint blush colors her cheeks. “You’re the first person I’ve told.”

It pleases him more than it should. Enough that he says, “Then I guess it’s only fair that you’re the first person I tell, too. I think I’m going to Binghamton.”

He’d wanted to hold onto the news until he knew for sure – 100 percent sure – that his financial aid would come through. But his acceptance had arrived along with the offer of a merit scholarship that caught him by surprise, and gave him a little more breathing room, financially speaking.

Then there’s Betty, sitting beside him, a pretty flush on her face, her knee still resting warm against his own.

“Oh my god, Jug! Congratulations!” She squeezes his arm.

“Yeah, I’m….it’s pretty cool,” he admits, rubbing at the back of his neck.

“And that’s only like, an hour from where I’ll be, right?”

“Um, yeah, I think so,” Jughead says, as though he hadn’t googled the distance between the two the moment he’d realized that their top choice colleges were in the same general part of the state. “Guess we’ll both be living that upstate life.”

“Guess so.”

The bell rings, and Betty sighs. “This all feels so pointless now,” she says as they trudge back up the stairs.

“Still gotta graduate, Cooper,” Jughead says, nudging her lightly with his elbow.

They come to the end of the hallway; Betty’s next class, he knows, is in the opposite direction of his. Both of them hesitate. “Pop’s after school? We can celebrate,” Betty says, with what he thinks is a hint of shyness.

“I’ll be there,” Jughead promises, and heads to class feeling lighter than he has in weeks.


	21. this is torture.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: send me the first sentence and i'll write the next 5+

“This is _torture_.”

Betty shakes her head slightly as she bends down to peek through the oven door. “You’re ridiculous.”

“I’m starving.”

“There are clementines in the fridge.”

“Not _that_ starving,” Jughead grumbles. “I seriously can’t have a single cupcake?”

“There have to be enough to fill the cupcake stand, Jug.” Betty straightens up, putting her hands on her hips, but she’s unable to keep a straight face when she sees his glum expression. _He’s so **cute** , _she thinks with a giddy little flutter in her stomach, a thought that had first entered her head about three and a half weeks ago as they’d packed up their bookbags one evening in the Blue and Gold office, and many more times in the days since.

It had felt – well, _weird_ , that first time, thinking Jughead was cute. Not that she didn’t think _of_ him very often – she did, especially since they’d fallen down the rabbit hole of Jason Blossom’s murder together – but she had always been much more likely to think that he was clever, or silly, or even mysterious. _Cute_ was the word she reserved for Archie, and Harry Styles, and that senior boy on the soccer team with the dark brown eyes whose locker was across the hallway from hers.

But out of nowhere, she’d thought it – _Jughead is so cute_ – and apparently he’d been having similar thoughts about her, because only a week later he’d kissed her in her bedroom, and now he’s her boyfriend.

Her _boyfriend._

Veronica had beaten both of them to the punch in saying it. But they’d talked about it afterward, moseying down the sidewalk towards her house hand-in-hand, and they’d agreed. They were boyfriend and girlfriend. They were dating. They were exclusive.

And now he’s here in her family’s kitchen, helping her bake cupcakes for her sister’s baby shower, and it all feels so warm and goofy and _normal_ that it makes her heart sing. (She hasn’t thought about the murder board in hours.)

Jughead steps towards her, and tugs at the ruffled edges of her apron. “Have I mentioned you look very pretty today?”

Betty smiles as his hands find her waist, his touch tentative at first, then firmer as she leans into him. He hasn’t done that much yet – touched her somewhere other than her hands, or her face as they kiss. She wants him to. But she isn’t sure how to ask.

For now, she settles for the light grip of his fingers around her middle, the tiny shiver it sends up her spine. “Now you’re just buttering me up.”

“Guilty as charged,” he agrees, rubbing his thumbs gently over the fabric of her sweater. “Is it working?”

Betty stands up on her tiptoes, and presses her lips to his. “Nope.”


	22. have you ever thought about our future?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: send me the first sentence and i'll write the next 5+

“Have you ever thought about our future?” she asks him, interrupting his reading.

Jughead folds over the corner of his page and then, seeing her eyes widen, hastily smooths it back out with his thumb. Of course Betty would be scandalized by minor defacement of a book. She actually  _belongs_  here.

He flips the book over on the marble-topped coffee table instead, taking a moment to stretch his legs, and think about his answer. “Our  _future?_ ” he repeats. “Doesn’t the fact that we’re dead kind of…y’know…negate the whole concept?”

(According to Pop, their neighborhood architect, the very concept of  _time_  no longer exists here in the Good Place. Which Jughead thinks is more or less bullshirt, since the sun still rises every “morning” and sets every “night” just like it did back on Earth. A day is still a day, even if it’s only the illusion of one.)

Betty sits at the other end of the sofa, tugging slightly at the Peter Pan collar she always seems to be wearing, even though it’s 78 degrees with a light breeze and low humidity at any given moment – the perfect temperature for daily human existence, also according to Pop, who had said it so jovially that Jughead had removed his sherpa jacket rather than tell the guy it was kind of making him uncomfortably warm.

“Maybe technically, but…we’re still  _here_. We’re still conscious, forming memories. We still have a future ahead of us even if it never ends.”

She’s right, he thinks, turning sideways on the couch to face her. And the truth is, he  _has_  thought about it before.

About the fact that he’s going to spend eternity with Veronica Lodge, the soulmate of the one other guy on the planet somehow unlucky enough to not only end up with the name Forsythe Pendleton Jones III, but also get caught up in some kind of bureaucratic afterlife error that resulted in, well, this.

It’s better than an eternity spent in the Bad Place, Jughead figures, based on the few brief, disturbing comments Pop has made.

Plus, there’s Betty.

Betty, who is staring at him with a little frown on her face, probably because he’s been staring at  _her_ in silence for much longer than is acceptable in polite company. And Betty is nothing if not polite company.

“Yeah, I mean, I guess.” Jughead shrugs. “Why?”

Betty sighs, flopping back against the arm of the sofa in a way that makes her sweater ride up and Jughead’s pulse thrum erratically in his chest. It’s a relief, almost, to know for certain that he’s the wrong Forsythe, and not  _really_ Veronica’s soulmate. Otherwise he’d feel really, really guilty about the fact that he’s been lusting after another woman for almost his entire afterlife so far, and constantly wondering how long it would take until “I want to fork you” stopped sounding super awkward in bed, and started sounding sexy instead.

(The answer is probably never, he thinks.)

“This morning I asked Archie if he thought Neil deGrasse Tyson would go to the Good Place,” she says, “and he said, ‘Well, not after he bit that guy’s ear off.’”

Jughead wants so badly to laugh. But a good person – a Good Place kind of person – wouldn’t laugh.

Instead he calls for Kevin, who appears instantly and produces two piping hot cheeseburgers a fraction of a second later. Betty grins, and digs into her burger with just as much gusto as Jughead himself, as he knew she would.

So maybe he’s stuck with a snooty heiress for all of eternity, and maybe she’s stuck with a golden retriever in the body of an NFL player.

But if he gets to eat burgers this good with Betty Cooper for the rest of his afterlife – maybe it won’t be so bad after all.


	23. i don't want you to go.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> kisses prompt: Kissing in a stairwell, giving them an artificial height difference.

The bell rings, its shrill echo bouncing off the concrete walls of the empty stairwell. But rather than spring to her feet, Betty burrows even closer into Jughead’s side, her cheek resting on his shoulder.

He runs his hand up and down her arm, giving it a quick squeeze. “You’re gonna be late for class.”

“So are you,” she mumbles.

“Yes, but as of 2:25 p.m. today, _I_ am no longer a student at Riverdale High.”

Betty can’t stop her mouth from sliding into a frown at his words.

On some level, she knows she’s being slightly ridiculous. Jughead is going to another school – a school across town that is rumored to be crawling with gangs and drugs and other things of a criminal nature – but it’s not like he’s moving to Toledo, which was also on the table at some point. They’ll still see one another in the evenings at Pop’s, snuggled up in their favorite booth with their best friends and an endless supply of milkshakes. They’ll still have the weekends to take afternoon naps together in his bed, to watch movies together on his lumpy couch. To kiss, and maybe do more than kiss, alone in the trailer that sits just a few dozen feet to the wrong side of the tracks.

She knows all of this. But she also knows that she’s going to miss him: his steady warmth, the press of his thigh against hers when he’s sitting beside her in the student lounge. The sight of him hunched over an ancient desktop computer when she walks into the Blue & Gold office at the end of the day. Seeing him in the hallway between fifth and sixth periods, and the shivery little thrill that never fails to race up her spine when their hands brush together as they pass.

“I don’t want you to go,” she says for what is probably the eightieth time since he told her he was transferring to Southside a week ago. She feels his shoulder rise and fall in a sigh.

“I know. But I have to.” Jughead squeezes her against him again, and then dislodges himself gently from her grip, grasping her hand in his as he stands. “Just like you have to go to class. I’m not gonna be the one responsible for disrupting Betty Cooper’s 4.0 GPA.”

Betty lets him tug her to her feet, keeping her grip on his hand as he takes a step down. From here she can see the top of his beanie, the tiny hole that’s beginning to form along one of its seams – a rare view of her boyfriend, who seems to always be slouching down just to kiss her.

Feeling oddly as though she has the upper hand, she tugs him towards her. “C’mere.”

Jughead has to rise up onto his tiptoes as he leans in for a kiss, a fact that makes her smile as their lips meet; the kiss is soft, sweet, lingering on just a little bit longer than is appropriate for an academic setting, albeit one in a stairwell.

When they break the kiss, Jughead remains slightly elevated on his toes, close enough that she can feel his breath on her cheek when he says, “Meet me back here when you’ve got study hall fourth period. I can skip chem.”

Betty keeps her books pressed close to her chest as she hurries towards her next class, the flush on her cheeks only partly due to the exertion.

If she’s only got one day left with Jughead in the halls of Riverdale High, they may as well make the most of it.


	24. we're out of that.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> kisses prompt: One person pouting, only to have it removed by a kiss from the other person.

Midge pops a hip against the edge of the table and flips open her order pad. “You guys ready?”

“I’ll start,” Veronica proclaims, as though anyone else would dare to go first when she’s in the booth. “I’ll have a grilled chicken sandwich with the side salad, and a chocolate milkshake.”

“Who orders a _side salad_ at Pop’s?” Jughead mutters, flushing when Betty knocks her foot against his ankle beneath the table.

“A cheeseburger and fries for me. And a strawberry milkshake,” Archie adds.

“I’ll have a burger with onion rings and a vanilla shake, please,” Betty chimes in.

Jughead shakes his head. “You all disappoint me. Don’t you know what time of year it is? I’ll have the double-decker with fries _and_ an order of onion rings, plus a shamrock shake.”

Midge pops her gum as she scribbles down the orders. “We’re out of that.”

Jughead frowns. “Out of what?”

“The shamrock shake.”

“How can you be _out_ of the shamrock shake? It’s supposed to be available for the whole month of March!”

“I don’t know, we ran out of mint ice cream or something,” Midge snaps. “I don’t run the kitchen.”

Speechless, Jughead stares at her in disbelief until Betty says, “He’ll have a chocolate shake, then. Thanks, Midge!”

Their classmate walks away with a roll of her eyes.

Betty turns back to Jughead, her face falling when she sees his stricken expression. “Oh, did you not want chocolate? I can go tell her –”

“No, no, it’s fine.” Jughead slumps in his seat. “I can’t believe they don’t have the shamrock shake. I look forward to this all year!” He crosses his arms over his chest and looks pointedly at the wall.

Veronica leans forward, eyes wide with fascination. “Hang on…is Jughead _pouting_? You guys, Jughead is _pouting._ ”

Archie rests a hand on her shoulder, gently pulling her back. “Ronnie, knock it off.”

Betty opens her mouth as if to speak, pauses, and then leans over to press a brief kiss to Jughead’s cheek. She pulls away just as abruptly, her cheeks flooding with pink when she tells him, “I have mint chocolate chip at home, Juggie. I could make you one if you want to come over and study for the history test later.”

Jughead sits up a little, tugging sheepishly at the back of his beanie as heat creeps up his neck. “Okay. Yeah, um – that’d be great.”

“A study sesh sounds awesome, Betty.” Archie shakes his head in bewilderment. “I’m still really confused about which countries were the Allies –”

“I can help you with that, Archiekins,” Veronica interrupts, patting him fondly on the arm. “We wouldn’t want to risk Betty running out before Jughead gets his milkshake.”


	25. you want to take a break?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> kisses prompt: Distracting kisses from someone that are meant to stop the other person from finishing their work, and give them kisses instead.

Betty caps the marker in her hand and tosses it into the wastebasket with a sigh. “Jug, can you get me another marker? This one just ran out.”

He doesn’t answer, but she hears the soft thump of his feet landing on the carpet, shortly followed by a hand on her shoulder and a blue marker placed firmly on the desk. Jughead leans over her shoulder to peer at the index cards stacked in neat piles before her. “How far did you get?”

“All the way up to Q.” Betty tilts her head to one side, then the other, stretching out the sore muscles of her neck. Before she can settle back in and continue on with the flash cards, Jughead’s hand slides down her shoulder, his nose nuzzling just beneath her ear.

“Mm.” She leans back a little in her seat and bites her lower lip when his mouth touches her neck, heat spreading through her from the spot where he’s pressing soft kisses against her skin.

“You want to take a break?”

As her eyes flutter shut, she almost says _yes_ – but Betty has never been one to let pleasure stand in the way of duty.

“We can’t,” she insists, surprised by just how reluctant her own voice sounds. Jughead dips his head lower, tugging the neckline of her shirt aside so he can mouth at the base of her neck. “Archie…needs our help.”

“That’s very _benevolent_ of you, Betts.” He winds his fingers through her ponytail, tugging her head back slightly to give himself better access to her collarbone. “But I’m feeling a little _insatiable_ right now, and I’m _dubious_ that Archie’s going to be home from practice before dinnertime, anyway.”

“Juggie,” she giggles. “Are you trying to seduce me by way of SAT words?”

He pauses his movements. “Am I that _transparent?_ ”

“I’m just finding this all really… _provocative_.”

His laugh is low against her ear. “No one’s home. We’ve got hours. Come to bed with me.”

And she does. _Readily._


	26. i'm obviously not sitting on the floor.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> kisses prompt: Kisses exchanged while one person sits on the other’s lap.

Movie night at Archie’s was _supposed_ to be just the four of them.

But as soon as Veronica had realized that Betty and Jughead were _official_ now, she’d panicked, and invited Ethel along as a buffer between Archie and herself. Archie had asked Reggie to come, just in case Veronica and Ethel’s girl-talk and Betty and Jughead’s (purely hypothetical) canoodling left him feeling like a fifth wheel in his own living room. Of course Cheryl Blossom had overheard _that_ conversation, and promptly informed Archie that she’d be attending his movie night as well, along with half of the sophomore class.

It’s not that Betty minds being squished up against her boyfriend on Archie’s sofa. In fact, she kind of likes it, and the fact that Jughead’s arm slots so neatly around her shoulders. Which is why she is _not_ going to succumb to Cheryl’s death stare, and give up her spot on the couch.

“I’m obviously not sitting on the floor,” Cheryl says, crossing her arms over her chest.

Betty crosses her arms, too. “I was here first, Cheryl.”

“I very _clearly_ told Archie when I accepted his invitation that I would reserve the second seat from the left. It’s the only spot with a head-on view of the tv screen _and_ sufficient proximity to the window, which by the way someone should open because it smells like a locker room in here.”

“First of all, Archie didn’t even invite you. Second of all –”

“I’ll sit on the floor,” Jughead announces loudly, withdrawing his arm from Betty’s shoulders. “I don’t care. Please just shut up, Cheryl.”

“Juggie, _no_.” Betty wraps both of her arms around his, anchoring him in place beside her. “We were _both_ here first.”

Veronica claps her hands together. “Why don’t we compromise? Betty, you can sit in your beau’s lap while Cheryl takes a seat on the couch. That way _no one_ has to sit on the floor.”

Wide-eyed, Betty exchanges a look with Jughead. Sure, they’ve held hands, hugged, kissed – five times now, not that she’s keeping count. And she’d even recently admitted to her mother that they were dating, after Alice had asked her why in the world he was coming over to accompany her on the thirty-second walk from her front door to Archie’s.

But sitting in his lap? In a room full of their friends and classmates? For _two hours?_ It feels like several levels of PDA beyond what she’s considered at this point.

Sensing her hesitation, Jughead shrugs. “Your call, Betts. I’m happy either way.”

With one last glare in Cheryl’s direction, Betty stands up, smooths down her skirt, and then wraps one arm around Jughead’s neck as she settles herself carefully into his lap. His hands clasp her waist, adjusting her position. Reggie wolf-whistles, then yelps when Veronica smacks him on the arm.

Jughead’s thumb rubs up and down where it rests on the curve of her hip. “This okay?” he asks quietly. “You comfy?”

“Very,” Betty says, and leans down to press a soft kiss against his mouth: their sixth, and the first in front of anyone else.

Cheryl chooses that moment to slot herself onto the sofa, jostling them both out of the kiss. “You’d better not pop a boner while I’m sitting here, Jones,” she mutters.

“Definitely not while you’re next to me, Blossom,” he shoots back.

Betty rolls her eyes and settles back against him for what’s sure to be an interesting night.


	27. you don't count.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> kisses prompt: Tentative kisses given in the dark.

Betty finds him a few minutes’ walk from the bonfire, sitting in the grass on the bank of the Sweetwater. His shoes and socks lay scattered on the dirt path behind him, the laces of his sneakers still tied, as though he’d been so desperate to reach the water he’d simply torn them off as he strode towards the river’s edge.

“Juggie.” She calls his name as she slips off her flats, and tiptoes the last few feet to reach his side, smoothing the skirt of her dress out beneath her as she settles onto the ground beside him. (Her mother will be furious when she sees the dirt smudged into the baby blue fabric, but Betty doesn’t care. A graduation dress is like a wedding dress, Veronica had told her: you’re only supposed to wear it once.)

“Hey.” He seems surprised by her presence. “What are you doing out here?”

Betty shrugs, skimming her toes along the water; her legs are shorter than his, and she has to stretch them out straight to even reach the surface. “I missed you.”

For all the quick, sarcastic witticisms he’s tossed off over the years, Jughead doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. She smiles. Maybe she’s finally left him speechless.

She plants her palms on the ground and lowers herself just a few inches further down into the water, far enough that she can kick a little splash of water onto his ankle. “Why are _you_ out here?”

He splashes her in mild retaliation, and she giggles, swinging herself back onto the grass.

“I just wanted some space.” Jughead leans back on his elbows, tipping his head up towards the sky. Betty follows his gaze; the moon is nearly full and shining with a bright, yellow-white light that shimmers off of the river’s gentle current. “Graduation was such a clusterfuck, and my mom and J.B. are in town so we all went out for dinner, and then the party…I just needed to hear myself think. Get away from the masses.”

Betty’s heart squeezes in her chest. Here she’d been excited to steal a moment alone with him, and all he’d wanted was to _actually_ be alone.

“I’m sorry,” she says, pulling her feet out of the water. “I’ll see you back there, maybe –”

“Betty, no.” His hand on her wrist is gentle but firm. “You don’t count.”

She twists to look at him, half-prone on the ground beside her, blue-gray eyes glittering in the moonlight. He’s not smiling, she doesn’t think, though sometimes it’s hard to tell with Jughead, even in the daylight.

Betty leans down and presses her lips to his.

When it’s over he sits up, his fingers still warm where they circle her wrist. She tilts her gaze up to meet his eyes, feeling dizzy at the shift (or maybe it’s the fact that he’s staring at her mouth like it’s a thing of wonder, like he’s both aroused by and afraid of it).

“What was that for?” he asks.

Betty knows she’s blushing, is grateful that the night sky has turned them both silvery and shadowed.

“For everything,” she tells him.

He leans in first this time; the second kiss is less hesitant, more confident, equally good.

“What was _that_ for?” she teases, feeling bolder in the dark, in the post-kiss glow that is maybe the moonlight, maybe her imagination.

His fingers trace over her cheekbone, her jawline, down the slope of her neck.

“For you.”


End file.
